News

Real India, please stand up

I am surprised and disappointed that a writer as gifted and original as William Dalrymple (review of An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World by Pankaj Mishra, Books, last week) should sully his elegant prose with a hoary cliché in referring to “the real India of the villages and dusty provincial towns”. He says that “a tiny English-speaking elite educated in a handful of Indian public schools” are in some respects “strangers” to this putative “real India”.

This is a rather patronising assumption since, as Dalrymple knows, the English-speaking elite has a tradition going back at least to the early 19th century and, in any case, any Indian minority has as much right to be considered as part of the “real India” as any other group, regardless of how “privileged” it is. Surely Dalrymple considers himself part of the “the real Britain” or “the real Scotland” despite his